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Comment by AnonC | Hacker News Reader

I've tried Seek by iNaturalist [1] to identify some plants in real time (the app can also identify fungi and wildlife). It's been a bit hit or miss sometimes. I like that it doesn't require any registration and doesn't collect any data. I'd like to know how this compares (at least for plants).

[1]: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app

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Myco-nerd here: absolutely never rely on the image recognition apps for fungi ID.

There are fungi in entire different genera that are VERY morphologically similar, and the apps are just not there yet — likely won't be for a few dozen years.

An app can make a lethal mistake much easier than a human.

I’ve used Google Lens as “if it says unsafe, definitely unsafe”. I would not rely on it for “oh yeah, I can eat this” :).

I doubt your “few dozen years” though. Humans are only so good at it themselves. Computing has improved a lot since 1984 (3 dozen years ago), and so I’d wager that by 2050 we can be better than human at “Eat or not?” for fungi. Up for a longbets.org wager? :)

I mean the thing about fungi is that the tops can look the same and you just need to do a spore print to positivity distinguish one from another. There may be some mushrooms which are simply impossible to tell apart by outward appearance. In one of the fast.ai lectures Jeremy shows how to distinguish different breeds of cats. Then he shows how to look at the confusion matrix, and he found one pair of breeds the network really struggled with. It turns out they look really similar to him too, and when he researched further he found they’re simply hard to tell apart. Perhaps with an enormous data set there might be small differences a network could detect, but the confidence might still be low.

And given that mushrooms can kill you, it may simply never be advisable to rely on any photo based identification.

I don’t consider it against the rules of the bet to allow multiple pictures, including the underside and perhaps even “here, smush the mushroom on a piece of paper and take a picture of that”. My question is can a vision-based AI thing outperform humans within another thirty years, not if it can do it via a mechanism that isn’t discriminating.

For all the myco folks here: Do you have a sense of whether or not the multiple hours mentioned is “required” or “just” makes it easier to get a strong signal? (That is, how much is the signal boost due to our inability to see well as humans)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_print

We foragers and amateur mycologists use smell, touch (slimy, dry, etc,) sometimes taste (bitter, acrid,...), habitat (on wood, ground, type of wood, is there a bulb below ground or a root-like structure, time of year, spore prints, sometimes color change due to drops of chemicals (especially on boletes), sometimes even microscopes to view spores, and more.

all of these variables could of course be coded for a good classification algorithm.

just saying, it's often more than simply visual.

It's mostly visual. I would add location and latest weather to any software trying to recognize the mushroom. The mushrooms that people commonly forage for are not that numerous, so the algorithm needs to know about a dozen or two varieties. Chanterelles are easy to tell from images. You can probably have an AI chanterelle identifier coded right now and for most edible mushrooms very soon if not now.

Other sensors combined with photo would likely be the solution and the results might not be instant for some samples.

Neat :) I just had a little play with that in our garden it got things like himalayan clematis, forget-me-nots, dafodils and chives right. Will have to try on mushrooms etc!

Sometimes when it didn't seem to give a high accurate match it says 'dicots' for the family.

It said hemp family for my hops, I guess it's hard to get an exact match of hops, unless they're flowering I guess. But impressed it got that, it seems a hard problem!

Edit: it did get hops eventually after trying a different angle :)

I heard about this app on the radio yesterday and I literally just got back inside from using it to identify a plant outside my house. It worked ok. when I went to install it, there were a number of other apps that came up in the app store and I downloaded picturethis which identified the plant instantly whereas inaturalist gave me a list of possible plants to pick from. picturethis has some in subscription stuff going on that I didn't look into tough.

I haven't tried Seek, but I've had better luck with animals than with plants on iNaturalist, personally. It's useful to algorithmically ID the plant family.

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